LinkedIn evidently has aggressive expansion plans for India. It had recently announced that it had hired ex country head, India, of social networking site MySpace, Mr. Hari V Krishnan, as the country manager for LinkedIn, India. As of today, the LinkedIn India’s local office at Bandra –Kurla complex, Mumbai, seems to be operational.
The Local office, as per this press release, would focus on building brand awareness by creating strategic partnerships with media and other distribution channels. As a first step in that direction, LinkedIn today announced its strategic partnership with Network18.
To better engage with professionals in India, LinkedIn has also announced a co-marketing agreement with Network18 that initially includes integration of business and finance content from Moneycontrol on LinkedIn and community-generated content from LinkedIn on CNBC-TV18. The agreement is the first media partnership announced by LinkedIn in India and is a part of the company’s strategy to growing brand awareness among professionals in the country.
Moneycontrol, one may recall, is India’s leading financial information source. It is the official site for CNBC TV18, and provides news, views, and analysis on equity and other business news. The relationship seems to be of mutual benefit, while LinkedIn gets a lot of good content form Moneycontrol and helps improves its user experience, by pushing its user generated content to CNBC TV18 , it is also increases brand awareness about LinkedIn in not so net-savvy TV viewers.
However, to me LinkedIn seems to be the one benefitting more form this arrangement and I am not sure if it is not paying real money to Network18 for this tie-up. After all the UGC of LinkedIn is not worth the content and exposure that netwrok18 would provide LinkedIn.
What do you think? Who benefits most from this arrangement? An unsurprising answer might be that it is the LinkedIn end user like you and me which benefit the most; not only they get better LinkedIn experience there might be other goodies from Netwrok18 awaiting the users as more details are sketched.
LinkedIn seems to be on a roll nowadays. First it announced selective status updates and integration with Twitter and then it opened its API. With3.4 million out of its 55 million users based in India, India sure is a big market and LinkedIn is closely monitoring this Indian market.
With opening of API and the opening of a local office in India, perhaps the ground is fertile for LinkedIn to announce another major integration – that with one of the leading job portals in India/worldwide. I would bet that some form of integration with Naukri, Shine etc is imminent and would again benefit the end users like you and me. What do you think? What does the future hold for LinkedIn in India?
Comments
If I want market news I would go to Moneycontrol and not Linkedin, like if I want Twitter updates, I would check Twitter or my Tweetdeck and not Linkedin. If I was by chance on Linkedin and saw info from Moneycontrol I might click and follow the link, but that would be rare. The chances are I might already read the news through a Google alert for a term I am interested in or on Google news. I might be a boring exception than the rule, but that’s just me :-)
Websites are building links with each other like Twitter + Linkedin + MoneyControl hoping to have the user come to their site. What is happening is, what started out as a niche site (solving a particular business problem) ends up becoming a portal like Yahoo, but just with content from elsewhere. I am not sure that this is going to lead to blockbuster traffic or user retention.
Completely agree with Madhav here. I believe businesses should maintain their niche and not become generalized service providers. They should remember that they shot to success because of the unique service they were providing.
Gigajob India is a new job portal. You can use it without any costs. Features: free resume uploading and membership for everybody. Even jobs ads are free for both companies and Placement Consultants
I like LinkedIn because it has viable business model. Few days back I was trying to get introduced to a gentleman whom I don’t know, on LinkedIn. I couldn’t do it professionally, unless I opt for the paid up feature like – inmail & reference. (Finally I found a way do it). That I think a good feature to make money. You force individual to sell out in order to network with people.
India is young, strong and growth market. More & more youngsters will be on job market in years to come. More over, many of us Indians, are more professionally inclined rather than wasting hours and hours on FB playing farmville. With already a bigger chunk of its network in India and it is the natural for services like LinkedIn to fish here.
I think, the tie-up with moneycontrol.com is more to garner new users than with pushing the content. Pull those un-initiated on moneycontrol to LinkedIn via ads. LinkedIn is making in right moves.
@Madhav and @pooja, take the example of Google it started as a search engine but is now all over the place; why shouldn’t Linkedin at least try to corner the jobs and professional networking marketplace – if it can provide value to some users by exposing them to business news while signed in to linkedin or following linkedin conversation streams, that is a new leaf in their niche book.
@Saithiiak I concur that the business model of linkedIn is very viable
In this day and age, almost everything is available on the internet. Finding jobs online is very easy because there are a wide variety of job portals job seekers can register with to find their dream jobs.
Looking for a job can be tough. As a matter of fact, it can be one of life’s most stressful events, and also one of life’s greatest opportunities. If you haven’t yet encountered the wide variety of on-line resources for job seekers, you are in for a surprise.
One of the site that has everything available online for job seeker and Employer is Gigajob where an Employer can post the job for free and their are no hidden charges and also their is no count on the number of post of job. Job seeker can also post n-number of jobs at a time. For job seeker online resume database is also available, where he can view the resumes and prepare it by itself. Their is also an email alert facility available.
linkedin tying up with Network18 will be like putting all Product ads on linkedin….. and it will lose the Professional Look and feel…which is the USP of Linkedin and differentiates it from facebook……